Abstract

Social bots are automated accounts that use artificial intelligence to steer discussions and promote specific ideas or products on social media such as Twitter and Facebook. 1 To typical social media users browsing their feeds, social bots may go unnoticed as they are designed to resemble the appearance of human users (eg, showing a profile photo and listing a name or location) and behave online in a manner similar to humans (eg,“retweeting” or quoting others’ posts and “liking” or endorsing others’ tweets). Social bots have been studied by computer scientists for years. However, bots have only recently received greater public attention, alongside other social media practices being scrutinized by policymakers. In that context, researchers have discovered that a significant fraction of political tweets made before the 2016 US presidential election had been posted by social bots and that those tweets had been …

Date

2018

Authors

Jon-Patrick Allem, Emilio Ferrara

Journal

American journal of public health

Volume

108

Issue

8

Pages

1005-1006

Publisher

American Public Health Association